The botnets driving the recent distributed denial of service attacks are powered by millions of infected computers. Their coordinated flood of requests overwhelms the Internet's DNS servers, slowing them down and even knocking the servers offline. The long-term solution for site operators and visitors alike may rely on reluctant ISPs working together.

Use encryption, keep your software up-to-date, disable images in e-mail, scan e-mail attachments for viruses, use a nonadministrator Windows account, scan for viruses manually, and use a secure-erase utility to destroy old data.